Select Entry- Emilia Gherman, Age 30

Welcome to our Optimistic Essay category. Here you will find the $1,000 winning contest essay, 5 finalist essays and 15 honorable mention essays and a growing list of hand-picked select essays that readers submitted during our "Why Are You Optimistic About the Future?" contest.

The happy future when the world will be perfect , when I will be perfect - I used to think that this is the key to my eternal happiness. That utopic time never came - the world is not perfect, the life is not fair and I am made by mistakes, regrets, pain, love, fears, dreams never to come true.

It took me 30 years to realize that happiness is not a state in which you wake up one morning. It is not something you can buy. It's not something you can steal. It's not something you can just find one good day and keep for the rest of your life. Happiness is above all something to be learned. The key to being happy is learning to find reasons to be happy. More and more - it gets easier to be unhappy, anxious, hopeless. The world is full of hate and stupidity and greed, the life is unfair and cruel, people are selfish and voluntarily blind, the civilized world is battling with obesity, the third world dies of hunger. God is a way for some to find peace, and for others to justify war and crimes. Nature seems to punish the man in every single way: water, fire, earthquakes, tornadoes. Sunny days don't make the 7 o'clock news, but an 2.8 earthquake in Oregon is presented as the beginning of the end. Nice comedies like the ones with Katherine Hepburn are not made anymore, the entity named Public seems to have a taste only for spectacular, shocking, action.

It took me 30 years to understand: I have to learn how to be happy. Not because of what I see in the world, but despite of it. Not because I am part of the Prozac generation, but despite of it. So yes, I am optimistic about the future. Not because the future will get better, but because I learned that happiness is not something you stumble over by mistake. It is something you have to work on -one day at a time.